Lectures on Art, Delivered Before the University of Oxford in Hilary Term, 1870

by John Ruskin

And I wish you with your own eyes and fingers to trace, and in your own progress follow, the method of advance exemplified by these great schools. I wish you to begin by getting command of line, that is to say, by learning to draw a steady line, limiting with absolute correctness the form or space you intend it to limit; to proceed by getting command over flat tints, so that you may be able to fill the spaces you have enclosed, evenly, either with shade or colour according to the school you adopt; and finally to obtain the power of adding such fineness of gradation within the masses, as shall express their roundings, and their characters of texture.

140. Those who are familiar with the methods of existing schools must be aware that I thus nearly invert their practice of teaching. Students at present learn to draw details first, and to colour and mass them afterwards. I shall endeavour to teach you to arrange broad masses and colours first; and you shall put the details into them afterwards. I have several reasons for this audacity, of which you may justly require me to state the principal ones. The first is that, as I have shown you, this method I wish you to follow, is the natural one. All great artist nations have actually learned to work in this way, and I believe it therefore the right, as the hitherto successful one. Secondly, you will find it less irksome than the reverse method, and more definite. When a beginner is set at once to draw details, and make finished studies in light and shade, no master can correct his innumerable errors, or rescue him out of his endless difficulties. But in the natural method, he can correct, if he will, his own errors. You will have positive lines to draw, presenting no more difficulty, except in requiring greater steadiness of hand, than the outlines of a map. They will be generally sweeping and simple, instead of being jagged into promontories and bays; but assuredly, they may be drawn rightly (with patience), and their rightness tested with mathematical accuracy. You have only to follow your own line with tracing paper, and apply it to your own copy. If they do not correspond, you are wrong, and you need no master to show you where. Again; in washing in a flat tone of colour or shade, you can always see yourself if it is flat, and kept well within the edges; and you can set a piece of your colour side by side with that of the copy; if it does not match, you are wrong; and, again, you need no one to tell you so, if your eye for colour is true. It happens, indeed, more frequently than would be supposed, that there is real want of power in the eye to distinguish colours; and this I even suspect to be a condition which has been sometimes attendant on high degrees of cerebral sensitiveness in other directions; but such want of faculty would be detected in your first two or three exercises by this simple method, while, otherwise, you might go on for years endeavouring to colour from nature in vain. Lastly, and this is a very weighty collateral reason, such a method enables me to show you many things, besides the art of drawing. Every exercise that I prepare for you will be either a portion of some important example of ancient art, or of some natural object. However rudely or unsuccessfully you may draw it, (though I anticipate from you neither want of care nor success,) you will nevertheless have learned what no words could have so forcibly or completely taught you, either respecting early art or organic structure; and I am thus certain that not a moment you spend attentively will be altogether wasted, and that, generally, you will be twice gainers by every effort.

141. There is, however, yet another point in which I think a change of existing methods will be advisable. You have here in Oxford one of the finest collections in Europe of drawings in pen, and chalk, by Michael Angelo and Raphael. Of the whole number, you cannot but have noticed that not one is weak or student-like—all are evidently master's work.

You may look the galleries of Europe through, and so far as I know, or as it is possible to make with safety any so wide generalization, you will not find in them a childish or feeble drawing, by these, or by any other great master.

And farther:—by the greatest men—by Titian, Velasquez, or Veronese—you will hardly find an authentic drawing, at all. For the fact is, that while we moderns have always learned, or tried to learn, to paint by drawing, the ancients learned to draw by painting—or by engraving, more difficult still. The brush was put into their hands when they were children, and they were forced to draw with that, until, if they used the pen or crayon, they used it either with the lightness of a brush or the decision of a graver. Michael Angelo uses his pen like a chisel; but all of them seem to use it only when they are in the height of their power, and then for rapid notation of thought or for study of models; but never as a practice helping them to paint. Probably exercises of the severest kind were gone through in minute drawing by the apprentices of the goldsmiths, of which we hear and know little, and which were entirely matters of course. To these, and to the exquisiteness of care and touch developed in working precious metals, may probably be attributed the final triumph of Italian sculpture. Michael Angelo, when a boy, is said to have copied engravings by Schöngauer and others, with his pen, in facsimile so true that he could pass his drawings as the originals. But I should only discourage you from all farther attempts in art, if I asked you to imitate any of these accomplished drawings of the gem-artificers. You have, fortunately, a most interesting collection of them already in your galleries, and may try your hands on them if you will. But I desire rather that you should attempt nothing except what can by determination be absolutely accomplished, and be known and felt by you to be accomplished when it is so. Now, therefore, I am going at once to comply with that popular instinct which, I hope, so far as you care for drawing at all, you are still boys enough to feel, the desire to paint. Paint you shall; but remember, I understand by painting what you will not find easy. Paint you shall; but daub or blot you shall not: and there will be even more care required, though care of a pleasanter kind, to follow the lines traced for you with the point of the brush than if they had been drawn with that of a crayon. But from the very beginning (though carrying on at the same time an incidental practice with crayon and lead pencil), you shall try to draw a line of absolute correctness with the point, not of pen or crayon, but of the brush, as Apelles did, and as all coloured lines are drawn on Greek vases. A line of absolute correctness, observe. I do not care how slowly you do it, or with how many alterations, junctions, or re-touchings; the one thing I ask of you is, that the line shall be right, and right by measurement, to the same minuteness which you would have to give in a Government chart to the map of a dangerous shoal.

142. This question of measurement is, as you are probably aware, one much vexed in art schools; but it is determined indisputably by the very first words written by Lionardo: "Il giovane deve prima imparare prospettiva, per le misure d'ogni cosa."

Without absolute precision of measurement, it is certainly impossible for you to learn perspective rightly; and, as far as I can judge, impossible to learn anything else rightly. And in my past experience of teaching, I have found that such precision is of all things the most difficult to enforce on the pupils. It is easy to persuade to diligence, or provoke to enthusiasm; but I have found it hitherto impossible to humiliate one clever student into perfect accuracy.

It is, therefore, necessary, in beginning a system of drawing for the University, that no opening should be left for failure in this essential matter. I hope you will trust the words of the most accomplished draughtsman of Italy, and the painter of the great sacred picture which, perhaps beyond all others, has influenced the mind of Europe, when he tells you that your first duty is "to learn perspective by the measures of everything." For perspective, I will undertake that it shall be made, practically, quite easy to you; if you care to master the mathematics of it, they are carried as far as is necessary for you in my treatise written in 1859, of which copies shall be placed at your disposal in your working room. But the habit and dexterity of measurement you must acquire at once, and that with engineer's accuracy. I hope that in our now gradually developing system of education, elementary architectural or military drawing will be required at all public schools; so that when youths come to the University, it may be no more necessary for them to pass through the preliminary exercises of perspective than of grammar: for the present, I will place in your series examples simple and severe enough for all necessary practice.

143. And while you are learning to measure, and to draw, and lay flat tints, with the brush, you must also get easy command of the pen; for that is not only the great instrument for the first sketching, but its right use is the foundation of the art of illumination. In nothing is fine art more directly founded on utility than in the close dependence of decorative illumination on good writing. Perfect illumination is only writing made lovely; the moment it passes into picture-making it has lost its dignity and function. For pictures, small or great, if beautiful, ought not to be painted on leaves of books, to be worn with service; and pictures, small or great, not beautiful, should be painted nowhere. But to make writing itself beautiful,—to make the sweep of the pen lovely,—is the true art of illumination; and I particularly wish you to note this, because it happens continually that young girls who are incapable of tracing a single curve with steadiness, much more of delineating any ornamental or organic form with correctness, think that work, which would be intolerable in ordinary drawing, becomes tolerable when it is employed for the decoration of texts; and thus they render all healthy progress impossible, by protecting themselves in inefficiency under the shield of good motive. Whereas the right way of setting to work is to make themselves first mistresses of the art of writing beautifully; and then to apply that art in its proper degrees of development to whatever they desire permanently to write. And it is indeed a much more truly religious duty for girls to acquire a habit of deliberate, legible, and lovely penmanship in their daily use of the pen, than to illuminate any quantity of texts. Having done so, they may next discipline their hands into the control of lines of any length, and, finally, add the beauty of colour and form to the flowing of these perfect lines. But it is only after years of practice that they will be able to illuminate noble words rightly for the eyes, as it is only after years of practice that they can make them melodious rightly, with the voice.